We’re about two weeks removed from Joyner Lucas’ Twitter rant where he dissed Lollapalooza and Machine Gun Kelly and later claimed that Russian hackers were to blame for the posts. Most people took Lucas’ claim as nothing more than a joke (which he later admitted through an apology). With that being said, there was actually a recent hacking in the music community and this one was no joke. According to HipHopDX, YouTube channels that belong to big-name acts like Eminem, Drake, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and more were hacked recently. On Tuesday, fans noticed that odd videos were being posted on the accounts and they took to social media to share their findings.
https://twitter.com/L0aded01/status/1511260098655657986
Here are my notifications of the spam video on the official youtube channel of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles, and I know there are a lot more accounts that got hacked.
That's crazy, how someone can destroy your several year's hard work within a minute!@YouTube pic.twitter.com/W7FIhwH9jY— Kapil :) (@karntheai) April 5, 2022
https://twitter.com/India55876909/status/1511245815393787904
The videos have been removed from the artists’ accounts, but the unauthorized uploads had titles like “Free Paco Sanz (ft. Will Smith, Chris Rock, Skinny flex & Los Pelaos).” Paco Sanz is a Spanish swindler who was convicted of fraud a few months ago after he scammed numerous people after making them think he had a terminal sickness. As a result, Sanz, who most likely had nothing to do with the hacking, is set to spend the rest of his life in prison. Other artists like Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Lil Nas X, and the late Michael Jackson also saw their YouTube accounts hacked with similar videos.
While YouTube has not spoken out about the matter yet, music video partner VEVO released a statement to address the incident. “Some videos were directly uploaded to a small number of Vevo artist channels earlier today by an unauthorized source,” they said to the New York Post. “All of those improperly uploaded videos have since been deleted by Vevo. No pre-existing content was accessible to the source. While the artist channels have been secured and the incident has been resolved, as a best practice Vevo will be conducting a review of our security systems.”
You can see some screenshots and videos of the hacked accounts above.
